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Saturday, April 6, 2013

Stadium cake tutorial

I love to make my kids birthday cakes. I give them a few days to think over what kind of cake they want and then I think through how I'm going to make it. I love to try new things and I love a good challenge. So when Micah told me that he wanted a baseball cake "but not just the ball, the kind with dirt" I knew that a field wouldn't be too difficult and I thought it would be fun. Then the night before his birthday I was thinking more and more about the field and I thought, I could make this even better. I will not only make him a field I will make him a stadium. I thought about what pans to use and how to shape the cake just so...and this is what I came up with. Please remember I'm a mother with four kids not a professional cake decorator. So is this perfect? no. But I LOVE how it turned out and I'm proud that this is my first original creation!! I loved that when Greg looked at the cake and said "is this from pinterest?" I could say "NO. I thought this one up on my own" That's not to say that someone else hasn't made a cake like this it's just saying that I didn't have a tutorial to look at or any photos of stadium cakes filling my head when I made this. That's probably why I like it so much, I don't have the perfect pinterest picture to compare it to!!

Here's how I did it. I bake my homemade chocolate cake (Betty Crocker) in two 9inch round pans. I then frosted the bottom layer with green homemade butter frosting (Betty Crocker). I took the top layer and cut a big chunk out of the middle by holding my knife at an angle to get the "stadium seat" feel.

Then I just put the top layer on and covered up the green frosting with parchment paper. Don't forget to put a little parchment paper on your serving plate too so that the frosting doesn't get on it.

I frosted the top layer and sides with white frosting and then added sprinkles to be the crowd. Then I took some parchment paper and cut out the shape of the dirt so that I could add some crushed graham crackers to be the dirt. At this point the green frosting was getting a little hard so I had to "break up" the top part in order to get it sticky again. Then I put the graham cracker crumbs down and carefully peeled the parchment paper off.

I frosted the sides a little more and tried to make it as smooth as possible. I could have added more detail but I really wanted the focus to be on the field since that it was Micah requested in the first place. I also added some flags and a "welcome to Micah Stadium" sign! Micah loved his cake and we all enjoyed eating it as well. Here's an obscene amount of photos of the cake...can't help myself!

Here's my sweet little five year old!! Love him!!

I'm throwing him a "friend" baseball party today so next week I'll be back with some details about the party!! Have a great week!